I’ll kill you for this column, Mark Morford

I don’t even pretend to understand what this must be like. The daily, bone-deep fear, the struggle against seemingly overwhelming odds, the exhaustive effort it must take to write about all the deadly truths and violently unethical agendas all around your city, and I mean corruption at all levels, from military to government, police to drug cartel and back again, impossible to distinguish between each, and therefore rightfully fearing all.

It’s a ridiculously privileged position I and nearly all other columnists, journalists and bloggers in the West inhabit, despite the vicious media downturn, despite slashed budgets and the total lack of benefits, despite busted unions and gutted newspapers and the Internet making it almost impossible to have a stable, long-term career in journalism anymore.

But comparatively speaking? I live a charmed, wildly blessed media life. Because here I read about Mexican journalist Mascela Turati, who just won the Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism (file under: obscure but highly respectable) for her reporting on the Mexican drug war currently ravaging her country and who, in her acceptance speech, spoke of the 80 or so of her fellow journalists who have gone missing or been brutally murdered in the past handful of years.

(snip)

Turati included a harrowing “generic” example of how the typical story appears in regional papers: Reporter gets abducted right in front of a police station, in broad daylight, dragged away and massacred right in front of his daughter on their way to school. Reporter harassed and family threatened, car burned, home shot up, reporter soon “disappears” for daring to write about the drug wars in a way apparently savagely displeasing to the overlords who currently run the place. Reporter’s body is found days later, tortured and slashed, with a gruesome warning note. And so on.

The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2013/03/05/i%E2%80%99ll-kill-you-for-this-column/